If you have just lost a cat, you may have noticed something unfair. The world takes cat grief less seriously. Dogs get the sympathy cards; cats get “are you going to get another one?” But anyone who has been chosen by a cat, and it is always the cat who does the choosing, knows that the quiet ones leave the loudest silence. The empty windowsill. The spot at the foot of the bed that stays cold. The absence of that small weight landing on your lap at exactly the moment you needed it.
The Rainbow Bridge was written for every animal who has been especially close to someone, and it belongs to cats as fully as it belongs to anyone. What follows is where the poem actually came from, which turns out to be a better story than most sites bother to tell, and then five short poems we wrote ourselves and are giving away.
The Poem Nobody Could Claim
For most of its life the Rainbow Bridge belonged to no one. It travelled by photocopier and pushpin, and later by forwarded email: taped up in veterinary waiting rooms, folded into sympathy cards, read out in back gardens by people who had no idea who wrote it and no way of finding out. Most copies carried the same three words at the bottom. Author unknown.
Its reach grew through the 1980s and 1990s, the years when pet loss stopped being a private embarrassment and started being something people were allowed to grieve out loud. Bereavement hotlines opened. Practices began sending condolence notes after a euthanasia. The poem showed up exactly when there was a use for it.
And it spread the way folk texts spread, picking up small mutations at every retelling. Lines were added. Wording drifted. Whole passages appear in some versions and not in others. That is part of why the authorship question stayed tangled for so long: there was no single fixed text to trace back to a single fixed source.
The Claims That Came First
Several names were attached to the poem over the years, in books, in newspaper corrections, in long arguments on early internet forums.
Paul C. Dahm, a grief counselor in Oregon, was widely named as the author. He published a book called Rainbow Bridge in the 1990s, and people close to him said he had written the piece around 1981. William N. Britton also published a book on the legend in the 1990s and was credited by some as the writer. Wallace Sife, who founded the Association for Pet Loss and Bereavement, was named in other accounts.
None of it ever settled. No claim came with a manuscript older than the poem's known circulation, and each one had people who believed it completely. What that long argument really shows is how badly readers wanted the poem to have a person behind it.
What the 2023 Research Found
In 2023 the author and art historian Paul Koudounaris published research tracing the poem to Edna Clyne-Rekhy, a Scottish woman then in her eighties. She said she wrote it in 1959, at nineteen, in the days after her dog Major died, on a sheet of paper she never intended to show anyone. According to that research she still had the handwritten original. She had given copies to friends over the years, which is the likeliest route by which an unsigned page began its long drift.
Hers is the most widely accepted attribution today, and it is an attribution rather than a court ruling. What makes it convincing is the surviving document, and the fact that she was not chasing anything by coming forward. She had spent six decades not knowing that the page she wrote as a teenager had gone around the world without her.
It began with a dog, then. But look at what she was writing about: not dogs in particular, but any animal who had been close to a person. From the first line the meadow was open to every cat who ever picked someone out and stayed.
Why the Full Poem Is Not Reprinted Here
Nearly every site that ranks for this poem prints the whole thing and offers it as a free download. Ours did too, until recently. That made a kind of sense while everybody believed the text was an orphan with no owner attached.
It makes much less sense now. If Edna Clyne-Rekhy wrote it, then it is a piece of writing by a named author who was alive last year, and it is hers, the way any poem belongs to the person who wrote it. Handing it out for free from a site that sells memorial gifts is not something we are comfortable doing. So here is the line everybody knows, and the line it closes on, and that is as far as we will go.
“Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge. […] Then you cross Rainbow Bridge together.”
Rainbow Bridge, credited to Edna Clyne-Rekhy
The full text is not hard to find, and looking it up costs nothing. What we can hand over outright is writing of our own.
Five Poems for a Cat, Free to Use
These are ours. We wrote them for this page and we are giving them away. Read one out at a burial, print it in a card, tuck it into the box with the collar, say it in the kitchen to nobody in particular. No permission needed, no fee, no credit required. The only thing we ask is that they are not resold as somebody else's writing.
Each one hangs on a single object or habit, because that is where cat grief lives. It is not in the big statements. It is in the small non-negotiable system your cat ran the house by. Wherever you find our detail, cross it out and put yours in. If it was the top of the fridge and not the windowsill, your version is the better poem.
Laundry Policy
The basket came out of the dryer
and you were in it before it hit the table,
folded down into the towels
as though you had been washed as well.
I fold them cold now, standing up, fast.
They go in the cupboard smelling of nothing.
There was never any point arguing with you.
I would lose. I always lost.
The Desk Is Very Efficient Now
and turns my email into hgggggggg.
Nothing sits down on the one page I need
with the particular weight of a cat
who has decided the page is a bed
and the matter is closed.
I have not typed a wrong letter in weeks.
I would like to type a wrong letter.
The Bowl You Never Used
that you never drank from once,
not in eleven years, not when you were thirsty,
not when it was the only water in the house.
You wanted the bathroom tap.
A thin cold thread of it. On request. At night.
I still turn it on while I brush my teeth
and then stand there listening to it run
in a house where nobody is coming.
An Appointment, Not Affection
you picked me, and you were not sentimental about it.
You simply arrived on my chest at nine,
put your forehead against my chin,
and stayed the length of one programme.
It was not affection exactly. It was a booking.
Nobody has kept an appointment with me since.
The Dip in the Sill
a shallow worn place the shape of a cat
who regarded that spot as legally hers.
The birds are still on the feeder, unbothered,
and I am unreasonably angry with the birds.
Dust is settling into the dip.
I run my thumb through it most mornings,
which is not a thing I planned on becoming.
Written by Still Beside Me. Free to print, read aloud, or copy into a card. Please do not resell them as your own.
Why Losing a Cat Is Its Own Kind of Grief
Loving a cat was its own kind of love, so losing one is its own kind of loss. A dog loves everybody in the room. A cat picks one person, sometimes reluctantly, over months, entirely on their own schedule, and once a cat has chosen you, you carry that quietly proud feeling for the rest of your life. When they go, you do not just lose a pet. You lose the one creature on earth who decided, without being asked, that you were theirs.
Cat grief is also quieter to everyone outside the house, which can make it lonelier. There are no missed walks for the neighbors to notice. No empty leash by the door. The losses are small and constant and private: the windowsill where they watched the feeder every morning, the sound of paws hitting the floor when a tin was opened, the way they turned up whenever you were sad, silent and certain, as though comfort were a job they had assigned themselves.
That is why the Rainbow Bridge lands so hard on cat owners. The poem promises that the waiting goes both ways. The cat who watched for you from the window is watching still, and one day walks over to you the way she always did: at her own speed, on her own terms, and completely.
How People Use a Poem After a Cat Dies
Any of these work with the Rainbow Bridge, with one of ours, or with something you write yourself at the kitchen table.
In a sympathy card. When you don't know what to say to someone who has just lost their cat, a poem says it for you. Pair it with one specific memory, the windowsill, the lap, the greeting at the door, and the card stops being generic. If you want help finding the words, try our free sympathy message helper.
Framed with a photo. Printed beside a picture, a few lines become a daily point of contact, the kind that reminds you of the love before it reminds you of the loss. If you want something ready made, our cat memorial gifts pair a photo with words written about your cat in particular.
To explain it to a child. The meadow, the sunshine, the reunion: these are images a child can hold on to. Plenty of parents read the Rainbow Bridge aloud as a way of talking about where a cat has gone.
At a small farewell. Cats rarely get funerals, but many families hold a quiet moment anyway, burying a collar, planting something under the window she liked. Read slowly, a poem gives that moment its shape. It marks the loss as something that mattered, because it did.
Make It About Your Cat, Not Every Cat
Here is the honest limit of even the most beloved poem. The Rainbow Bridge was written for everyone, which means it was written for no one in particular. It does not mention the way your cat drank only from the faucet, or slept in the exact center of whatever you were reading, or waited on the third stair, always the third, for you to come home. Those specific things are what made her yours.
That is why so many people pair a borrowed poem with something personal. Our pet memorial poem generator is free, and it works from the real details you give it: the sill, the hour, the one absurd rule she kept. Keep the result alongside the Rainbow Bridge if you like. One tells you she is at peace. The other tells the world who she was. If you want more verses written for cats, our collection of pet memorial poems has them, and the dog version of this page carries five more poems if you are grieving a dog as well.
Rainbow Bridge Poem for Cats: Common Questions
Is there a Rainbow Bridge poem for cats?
There is one Rainbow Bridge poem, and it was written for any animal who has been especially close to someone, so it belongs to cats as fully as it does to dogs. This page tells the story of where it came from and quotes a line of it. It also gives you five original cat memorial poems, written by Still Beside Me, that are free to print or read aloud.
Who wrote the Rainbow Bridge poem?
For decades it circulated anonymously and several people were credited with it, among them Paul C. Dahm, William N. Britton and Wallace Sife. Research published in 2023 by the author Paul Koudounaris identified Edna Clyne-Rekhy, a Scottish woman who said she wrote it in 1959 at nineteen, after her dog Major died, and who still had her handwritten original. That is the most widely accepted attribution today.
Is the Rainbow Bridge poem in the public domain?
Probably not. Public domain generally applies to writing old enough for copyright to have lapsed, and a 1959 poem is not that old. Because the piece is credited to a named author who was living in 2023, the safe assumption is that it still belongs to her. That is why this page quotes a line rather than reprinting the whole poem.
Can I print a free poem for my cat's memorial?
Yes. The five cat poems on this page were written by Still Beside Me and are free to print, read aloud, or copy into a card, with no sign-up and no fee. We do not offer the Rainbow Bridge itself as a printable, because it is credited to a named author and is not ours to give away.
What can I say when someone loses a cat?
Say the cat's name, and name one specific thing about them: the windowsill they claimed, the way they picked one person's lap, the greeting at the door. Avoid anything that makes the loss sound small. A short personal note, with a poem underneath it, is enough.